In Total Quality Management, keeping a list of activities and tick marking each of the completed activity as and when it is done is a high potential quality improvement activity that has been accepted by management experts around the world.
Keeping a list of all activities to be completed for the day has always been a big hit with me as I tend to accomplish more things daily when I have the list of activities ready at hand and try to accomplish them step by step.
When all the actions used to hit our heads, I first started maintaining list of daily activities to be done that day;. I was exposed to this idea for the first time by my b-i-law Jiji Thomson IAS when I used to visit his residence in Alleppey. I asked him how he could do so many things in a day, he replied that he maintained list of activities.
Later on I finished Engineering at Trivandrum, went to MRF Arakkonam, MRF Goa for jobs, and Goa Engg College, got immersed in jobs, that I forgot about it.
I noticed the power of keeping lists of activities and checking each of them out as a very effective habit when I used to do it regularly at Goa Engineering College. Before we used to go out for the long vacation, may be for a week or a month, there were lot of official and domestic tasks that needed to be completed before we could go ahead.
Whenever I have specific time limits to accomplish tasks, like Friday evening or start of vacation period atCollege, I started maintaining the to-do-lists.
Click here for an interesting HBR article of August '20 "Conquer your to-do-list with this simple hack" on how to prioritise between activities in your to-do-list. It talks of dividing the activities as being important and urgent into four quadrants and attacking them systematically.
Total Quality Management mentions Check lists as an essential ingredient of the 7 most important TQM tools.
I am reminded of an article by Eric Larson in HBR in March '16, "A check list for making faster better decisions" (click here) wherein he mentions that decision making and target setting are the two important tasks managers do, day in and day out.
Eric Larson in his above article mentions that managers on an average make about 3 billion decisions every year while they also do goal-setting. Using to-do lists helped managers make be more effective in decision making 90% of the time while goal-setting helped only 30% of the time. The study on about 500 managers, showed that only 2% of Managers around the world make use of tools like to-do-list for making effective decisions, of which 90% do turn out to be really effective decisions.
We have heard of the moderately effective and popular 250 year old decision making tool, Writing Pros and Cons, popularised by US President Benjamin Franklin, which has got its own limitations as most of the time one does not get to know all the required information to help make a decision. .
The human tendency while carrying out decision making in situations of high uncertainty tend to be predictably irrational, exercising cognitive bias that prevent us from making the best decisions most of the time. Though technology in the form of Enterprise software has come to our help with the right processed information in some of the cases, most of the time, Managers have to make decisions with incomplete information. The article stresses the great importance and impact of check lists or to-do lists in managerial decision making.
George.
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